WIth the World Cup almost upon us, you can bet that there’ll be lots of new users joining your platform, and those that are best equipped to onboard them will be the ones that win big.

So how do you get yourself ahead of the competition? The answer’s simpler than you might think. Doing a document check could be the difference between winning and losing this summer. Here’s our hattrick of reasons why.

Corner the youth market

We all know that young men are the most frequent gamblers – in fact, our research shows that almost half of them (48%) bet at least monthly.

But did you know that young people are also the trickiest to onboard? Our customers tell us that when it comes to KYC, their match rates drop from around 82% to only 65% for this age range. That means you’re missing out on around two in five young users coming to your platform.

Don’t like those odds? Didn’t think so. Young players are often missed when it comes to Identity Record checks due to their thin credit files. Add in a document check, and you can easily and safely onboard them. That way you don’t miss out on new users, and they don’t miss out on the fun.

Cut out friendly fraud

It’s pretty easy to check an Identity Record. Run a name, date of birth and address against a credit bureau and you’ll be able to figure out if all the dots join up. But proving an identity exists is only one part of the puzzle. How do you know the person giving you their details actually owns them?

Quite often, they don’t. Customers can easily open multiple accounts with stolen or borrowed IDs, and use them to take advantage of free sign-on bets. While that might sound quite minor, it’s actually costing gambling platforms an estimated 15% of revenue. Performing a document check at the point of withdrawing funds means you can be sure the person claiming their winnings really is the person who owns the account. It’s also the best way to conform to gambling commission regulations to avoid heftier losses later.

Document checks don’t have to be painful. In fact, the right UX can actually increase your conversions from desktop. At Onfido, we’ve built a cross-device flow that allows your users to start the KYC process on their desktop, seamlessly switch to their mobile to capture images of their document and face, and then switch back to submit. It’s quick, frictionless, and reduces the drop-off that comes with endless, arduous customer inputs. Our research shows that a massive 84% of users would switch to a different provider for a better user experience. Make sure they’re coming to you.

To see the cross-device flow in action and find out more about Onfido could help you scale up your onboarding, contact us.

]]>It’s been an uncomfortable few days at ICE Totally Gaming.

This is the third year Onfido has been exhibiting at ICE, and the third year that we’ve seen some companies using ‘booth babes’ to attract attention. You might have seen and heard some of the backlash about this

This is the third year Onfido has been exhibiting at ICE, and the third year that we’ve seen some companies using ‘booth babes’ to attract attention. You might have seen and heard some of the backlash about this practice.

Onfido stands against it.

We attend lots of events, and we’ve never used hostesses for reasons that seemed obvious. Up to now, we’ve been happy to leave it at that.

But there comes a point where turning a blind eye isn’t enough. We might not engage in this sort of behaviour, but other businesses in our industry do — and as long as nobody speaks out about it, they always will. As a company that fiercely supports inclusivity and diversity, we felt we had to speak out about this now.

Objectification of the kind we saw at ICE is not ok, whether it’s a business event or not. Condoning the objectification of women at any level is to condone it at all levels, so being conscious of this issue — no matter how many try to brush it off as harmless entertainment — is crucial.

Tech companies don’t typically have the best rep when it comes to gender inclusivity — and it’s these kind of behaviours that exacerbate that problem. Onfido isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s something we’re actively working to improve in 2018 as we continue to grow. Our Director of Talent Acquisition, ZeShaan, recently wrote a blog about our Diversity and Inclusivity goals, one of which is to achieve 18% women in tech roles. That sounds low, and it is — but even global tech giants only track at around 15–19%, which goes to show how much of a challenge this represents.

Fixing the numbers is only one part of the problem. Even where women are included in the tech workforce, they’re not always welcomed — as the cascade of horror stories that followed Susan Fowler’s exposé of sexism at Uber made abundantly clear.

It’s a challenge that extends beyond the tech world, of course. In sports, too, it’s an issue — but one where progress is already being made. Just last week, Formula One switched its old tradition of grid girls for the new one of grid kids. That follows the news last month that darts is doing away with walk-on girls.

The gambling industry sits somewhere at the apex of tech and sports. On one hand, that means it’s particularly susceptible to the sexist practices that proliferate in each. But on the other, it means gambling is uniquely positioned to build upon the progress both are making.

The increase in regulation and support for problem gambling over the last few years demonstrates the industry’s commitment to social issues. Gambling businesses are known for being innovative, forward-thinking and receptive to change. But the treatment of women seems to be one area where the industry is falling behind.

By speaking out against practices we disagree with, and by working hard to achieve our own inclusivity goals, I’m hopeful we can effect real change. Of course, that change has to come from across the whole industry. The Gambling Commission has already (rightly) spoken out against the use of hostesses, but it’s up to the organisers of ICE and other conferences, and the leaders of the biggest and most influential businesses to take that message on board.

It’s the responsibility of everyone in this industry to do better. At Onfido, we want to help move gambling forward, and be an agent for change — not just with new tech, but new ideas.

Whether you’re a holder of a US driver’s license, or a business that relies on them, you’ll have heard a lot about the long-awaited REAL ID Act in the news this week.
It came into effect in California on Monday 22-January, and will eventually become mandatory across

Whether you’re a holder of a US driver’s license, or a business that relies on them, you’ll have heard a lot about the long-awaited REAL ID Act in the news this week.
It came into effect in California on Monday 22-January, and will eventually become mandatory across the US. But why do we need new ID cards, and what are they for?
Here’s what you need to know.

What

Put simply, it’s a new ID card that US citizens will need to board airplanes.
But it goes a little deeper than that. The ID cards are just one part of wider modifications to laws around security, authentication and immigration. Essentially, the goal is to tighten up on the procedures for issuing state driver's licenses and identity documents. REAL ID standards will cover everything from the process for verifying cardholders’ identities, to the physical security features of licenses and ID cards, and control over the facilities where credentials are stored and produced.

Why

Security. The idea was born way back in 2005 as part of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror.
Once it’s been fully implemented, the REAL ID ACT will make it much harder for terrorists and criminals to forge identity documents and gain access to aircraft. It also covers nuclear power plants and some federal facilities – what the Act calls “official purposes”.

Who

It’s a joint effort between the Department of Homeland Security and US states and territories.
Though participation by states is voluntary, Federal agencies will be banned from accepting IDs from non-compliant states for official purposes.

When

By October 1, 2020 all states must be issuing REAL ID-compliant cards, and citizens will need to make sure they have an updated card. After that, the TSA won’t accept any identity documents that don’t meet the federal standards.
But before then, there’ll be four planned phases. Each of the first three phases with begin with a three-month ‘notification period’ when non-compliant IDs will still be accepted.
A breakdown of the phases is here, but the key thing to note is that we’ve just entered phase 4 – the one that affects air travel. As of January 22nd 2018, all drivers’ licenses being used as ID at airports will need to be from a compliant state, or one that has an exception.

What does that mean for me as a US citizen?

There are a couple of things to be aware of.

One is the difference between compliant and materially compliant states. While compliant states meet all the requirements of the REAL ID Act, materially compliant states issue cards that meet many but not all of the criteria. The Act also changes the visa limits for some people – specifically temporary workers, nurses and Australian citizens.

At a higher level, the REAL ID Act will fund projects around border security, tighten the laws on applications for asylum and deportation of aliens for terrorism, and waive laws that interfere with the construction of physical barriers at borders.

What’s my new card going to look like?

Pretty different. Beyond the things you might expect (name, photo, signature, etc), there will also be new security features that will help prevent tampering, counterfeiting and other types of fraud. They’ll need to be in a standardized, machine-readable format – think barcodes, smart card technology and the like – but won’t feature RFID chips.

What about businesses that use US driver’s licenses as proof of identity?

Any processes that rely on driver’s licenses will need to be updated, too. Businesses will need to ensure that they both understand the new requirements, and can properly process them. For many, that will mean looking at procedures and updating their tech stack to verify that they can handle the new security features and format.

How’s Onfido getting ready for the change?

The first stop for us is getting the new documents into our global knowledge system, and updating our parameters. Once the new documents are onboarded, the next step will be to train our teams and update our machine learning models. As soon as the new documents start coming through our customer's applications, we’ll be ready for them.

Let us tell you the tale of a man called Ali Dia.

Ali Dia was a footballer. Well...in a manner of speaking, anyway.

Ali Dia had a famous cousin. George Weah had won the FIFA World Player of the Year in 1995. George had played with Ali at Paris St.Germain, and for Senegal, where they’d grown up. He could vouch for Ali.

George decided to make some phone calls. He called West Ham, Rotherham, Gillingham...would they like Ali Dia to play for their teams? They passed.
Then George called the manager of Southampton, Graeme Souness. Graeme said yes. He signed Ali Dia on a one-month contract.

Graeme Souness had never actually met Ali Dia. In fact, he’d never heard of him – or seen him play football – at all. But he was George Weah’s cousin! “When someone like that gives you a recommendation you tend to sit up and take notice”, said Graeme.

The other players at Southampton weren’t so sure. They’d seen Ali Dia during practice, and he didn’t seem that good.

But Ali Dia made the team anyway. On 23rd November 1996, he was sitting on the subs bench as Southampton played Leeds. After 32 minutes, Matt Le Tissier came off the pitch with an injury. This was Ali Dia’s time to shine.
It was a disaster.

“He ran around the pitch like Bambi on ice,” said Le Tissier. “It was very, very embarrassing to watch. We were like: ‘What’s this geezer doing? He’s hopeless.”
Graeme took him off the pitch. He turned up for physio on Sunday morning. And then Ali Dia was never seen again.

It all became clear. Ali Dia wasn’t he cousin of FIFA World Player of the Year George Weah. It hadn’t been George Weah on the phone. Ali Dia wasn’t even that good at football!

Ali Dia had lied about his identity.

So, what’s the moral of this story?

You should always check that people are who they claim to be.

With World Cup season almost upon us, it’s never been more important to Know Your Customer. While you may not be signing international footballers, you will be signing new users to you platform. Lots of them.

And while for Souness, failing to verify the identity of his new player cost the club “a couple of grand for two weeks’ wages”, it could cost you a lot more.

Onfido’s Machine Learning-based Identity Verification automates your KYC & AML. We scale as you do. And we do it securely. While everyone else is looking at the 11 men on the pitch, we’ll keep an eye on the millions joining your platform.

To find out how Onfido can help you scale securely this World Cup Season, [contact us].

]]>http://blog.onfido.com/2018/01/09/onfidos-2018-new-years-resolution/82bdcd75-acce-404a-8ba3-e1fcd3594b35Tue, 09 Jan 2018 13:51:02 GMTOpening a new bank account isn’t easy. It’s paper-heavy, time-intensive and frankly, inconvenient. From awkward opening hours, to the reams of paperwork required, it can be a mission to get access to your precious paycheck.

Opening a new bank account isn’t easy. It’s paper-heavy, time-intensive and frankly, inconvenient. From awkward opening hours, to the reams of paperwork required, it can be a mission to get access to your precious paycheck.

But with banking moving online, things are getting better – right?

Wrong.

59% of people have walked away from an online application in the last 12 months.

Up to half of digital applicants are being pushed offline to verify their identities, or to submit additional required documentation. If they do visit a branch to follow up, it often means beginning the application process again.

Clearly, that’s a problem. Processes are stuck in a paper-based world, and just don’t work for digital customers.

Only 38% of millennials have offline accounts

Over the past 10 years, the number of people using online banking has more than doubled from 30% to 63%

In 2016, 72% of consumers used digital channels to open a checking account, up from 12% in 2014.

But there’s good news. With the rise of challenger banks, a new, digital day is dawning. We partnered with Revolut, a leading online bank with over 1 million customers. Their goal? To revolutionise (pun intended) the way we do banking, so people3 can access their finances on their own terms. Opening an account takes just three minutes – then, customers are free to spend money anywhere in the world without fees, transfer funds globally with better exchange rates than most retail banks, and track all their purchases in an elegant app. Revolut is building the bank of the fast-paced, globalised future – and the customer’s right at the centre.

Check out the case study to see how Onfido is helping Revolut customers ditch the paperwork, while keeping Revolut KYC and AML compliant.

]]>My introduction to Onfido happened over a year ago. I had the opportunity to spend a few days with members of the tech, product and people teams; they shared with me their existing processes and challenges, and I suggested ways they could fine tune their product development processes, communication and]]>http://blog.onfido.com/2017/11/23/andywilde/67c513bd-de49-418f-8481-ef55fb278d7fThu, 23 Nov 2017 13:49:52 GMT

My introduction to Onfido happened over a year ago. I had the opportunity to spend a few days with members of the tech, product and people teams; they shared with me their existing processes and challenges, and I suggested ways they could fine tune their product development processes, communication and tech team hiring (among other things).

It was a memorable experience; I spent time with a young, smart, energetic, communicative and ambitious team that, despite having achieved notable success – and being rightly proud of that – was open about the challenges ahead. What’s more, they were happy to discuss those challenges, and genuinely open and enthusiastic to hear alternative ideas. It was clear to me that if the opportunity arose to work with that team, it wouldn’t take long to consider it. That opportunity did arise, and here I am.

Why Onfido?

Onfido helps businesses verify the authenticity of people signing up to their services. That, in turn, enables them to assess the trustworthiness of those people, and the risk involved in onboarding them. The need for this can be regulatory, or simply because it makes sound business sense, or a combination of both. We offer these services standalone via a dashboard, or via APIs and an SDK that fully integrates them into our clients’ own onboarding applications. Identity Verification is fundamental to our services is and we position ourselves as a B2B business, but the subtleties around it – such as making it a frictionless experience for applicants to minimise dropout – mean it’s best understood as a B2B2C offering. We recently announced our Series C round, the primary purpose of which is to enable us to scale up. Our vision is to serve a fuller range of market segments, increase our geographic coverage and introduce new services.

Scaling the tech team

To achieve these goals necessitates scaling our tech team. I’m fortunate to have inherited an already strong team of engineers and researchers - testament to the founders, the quality of the tech leadership and the emphasis placed on emphasis placed on establishing an a rich and supportive culture. It’s a great base from which to scale, but we need to be clear what scaling means, particularly for a tech team.

Scaling isn’t solely about the size of the team; in fact, principally it’s about outcomes. My priority is to increase our outcomes, and also to ensure that they’re properly targeted, of the highest possible quality and delivered efficiently. We also need to keep in mind the competitive nature of the Identity space, and rapid pace at which the state of the art moves – not just the solutions and technologies themselves, but the whole landscape that informs them.

On this latter point, Onfido currently operates at the intersection of Saas, Mobile, DevOps, Security, Privacy, Reliability and Availability, API’s and SDKs, and Machine Learning applied to document classification, data extraction, facial biometrics and fraud detection. It’s a lot to keep on top of, and while we’re pretty good at this list, they’re all fast moving areas. In the near future we could find our reach expanding even further – broader biometrics areas, federated identity, authentication, blockchain (minus the hype), behavioural and transactional analysis as a basis for building trust are just the first of a very long list. Undoubtedly, there are some interesting technology and product challenges ahead.

What’s next?

Sure, we’ll be growing the tech team to tackle these challenges – but to do so without fully appreciating that we are doing it to effect outcomes is one mistake we won’t be making. It’s important to place equal emphasis on how we do things as we do on what those things are, and what we use to realise them. Processes that work for a team of 50 won’t be optimal for a team of 100; grow from 100 to 200 and it changes again. Communication channels become more numerous and complex, organisational structure has to be re-assessed, the meaning of “just enough” process changes and culture and value dilution needs to be avoided. And those are just the more obvious considerations.

During my career I’ve seen huge changes in technology state-of-the-art and approaches to software engineering; experienced things done well and not so well; things that work and things that don’t. I like to think these experiences bring value to early stage and scaling tech businesses and I’m excited to put them to good use to help the tech team at Onfido take on our next set of challenges. I’m in no doubt that we’ll be successful. If you’re interested in joining the team as we build on the impressive base that’s already in place, get in touch.

]]>Who are you? And how can you prove it? It’s the age-old question that lies at the heart of the arms race to prevent fraud, protect privacy, and onboard new customers at scale. In an age where customers increasingly choose digital interactions over face-to-face ones, stronger and more secure]]>http://blog.onfido.com/2017/11/15/seeing-eye-to-eye-the-mass-market-adoption-of-facial-verification/604432eb-0b34-4447-a431-dac3c89ced84Wed, 15 Nov 2017 12:14:08 GMT

Who are you? And how can you prove it? It’s the age-old question that lies at the heart of the arms race to prevent fraud, protect privacy, and onboard new customers at scale. In an age where customers increasingly choose digital interactions over face-to-face ones, stronger and more secure authentication is needed to ensure that businesses truly know who they’re dealing with.
It was almost 60 years ago that the first experiments with computer-based facial recognition were devised. But since then, widespread adoption has been slowed by enterprising fraudsters who simply use a photo of their target to cheat the system. Now, a new wave of facial verification tech is tackling the problem head-on.

Blink and you’ll miss it

One answer to this challenge is the “blink to prove liveness” approach that’s been implemented by some identity verification providers. Unfortunately, it’s a method that falls short of its good intentions. Blinking-based solutions can be easily spoofed by cutting eye holes into a printout of the target’s face, and blinking behind it. Still, many view this stopgap measure as a permanent solution. Just last year, Mastercard, the guardian of our purse strings, debuted an app that allowed people to pay for good or services by simply blinking. But Mastercard isn’t the only big brand experimenting with facial verification, nor the most advanced.

Apple of my eye

With the introduction of Apple’s Face ID, accuracy and ease-of-use are combined into a single, beautiful user interface. Though currently reserved for the fortunate few who can afford a USD $1,000 phone, the iPhone X has succeeded where Samsung and others have failed, by incorporating robust and accurate 3-D facial verification into mainstream commodity technology. Significantly, the iPhone X does away with the fingerprint reader, which identifies a user, but doesn’t authenticate them. Instead, Apple’s Face ID analyses over “30,000 invisible dots to create a high-fidelity 3-D model of your face which isn’t found in print or 2-D digital photographs”. These security measures are a big step on from blinking-based solutions, and show how seriously Apple takes building a foolproof ‘anti-spoofing’ approach to facial authentication.

Smile and Pay

If Face ID seems futuristic, consider Apple’s Chinese counterparts, who have already leapfrogged most Western countries in their application of facial verification. Feeling peckish? Ant Financial, the financial services spinoff of e-commerce giant Alibaba, recently announced ‘Smile and Pay’ where customers at KFC in eastern China can now pay with just their faces. Targeted towards the younger generation, ‘Smile and Pay’ puts the user experience first, enabling users to satisfy their tender chicken yearnings while bypassing their wallet or smartphone altogether. The potential issue is that with an always-on facial recognition solution, our faces can be constantly analysed and advertising tailored in real-time in response to our reactions. While that’s great for advertisers, it makes many consumers understandably squeamish. So far, though, the convenience and utility of this application seems to be outweighing any privacy concerns, paving the path to mass market adoption.

Facing up to Fraud

But even facial verification solutions like Face ID and Smile and Pay fall short of true authentication. This technology will verify your face is the same one you signed up with – but not that it belongs to you. The only way to securely authenticate an identity is to combine facial recognition – and crucially, facial liveness – with a trusted government identity document, such as a passport or driver's license. But if blinking doesn’t cut it when it comes to proving liveness, what does? Multi-factor liveness solutions offer the most robust fraud protection. Asking users to repeat a sequence of numbers and perform a random movement proves they’re present, and provides a live picture of their face which can then be compared to their identity document. Faced with increasingly sophisticated fraudsters, a radically different approach which combines a number of features is the best way to ensure true authentication.

Technological innovations like these are a huge leap forward in the way that we prove, use and store our identities in an ever increasing digital world. While there’s undoubtedly still progress to be made, what’s clear is that we’re entering a new age of identity verification. As we spend more and more of our lives online, unlocking robust and secure authentication is only becoming more important. Facial Verification might just be the key.

Onfido has just launched the market’s most robust liveness detection to prevent identity fraud and help online businesses scale. To request a demo, contact info@onfido.com

]]>Unlocking the online digital world using your identity

It was 18 months ago that I first met Onfido, and I knew right then that I wanted to get involved. Being an investor was exciting, but I could see that the business was going to hit an explosion of demand very

It was 18 months ago that I first met Onfido, and I knew right then that I wanted to get involved. Being an investor was exciting, but I could see that the business was going to hit an explosion of demand very soon, and that’s when my skills could get busy. You may have seen that Onfido just raised a Series C round of $30m led by my partners at CraneVC with participation from Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Idinvest amongst others. Now is absolutely the time for them to accelerate International Expansion, building on the existing 1,500 clients across Europe and the USA. The future is very exciting for Onfido as it scales its machine learning-based Identity Verification platform further into the US, and drives expansion into India, Latin America and other international markets.

To capture this opportunity, Onfido are bringing onboard a new CPO (Kevin Trilli), CTO (Andy Wilde) and CRO (that’s me!). These new hires bring decades of deep experience to five-year-old Onfido, including specialised security, SaaS, AI and data technology skills from companies that have scaled rapidly to become world leaders. I’ve personally seen the good things that can happen when you bring experienced operators into disruptive companies, and I can’t wait to see the next chapters being written in the Onfido story. It’s truly humbling to see a company from the UK be so impactful and visionary.

Onfido has offices in San Francisco, New York, Lisbon and New Delhi, plus London where I’ll be located. Founded in 2012, the identity verification company has grown from 25 to 150 employees in just over 2 years, while growing revenue 5x year over year.

But scaling a business is hard, and many companies can easily plateau as they raise that pivotal Series C round. It’s generally agreed that Series C puts you in the category of a ‘real business’, the culmination of all the passion, sweat and tears of the early believers. But unfortunately, sweat and passion alone can’t give you exponential growth, especially the sort of growth needed to lead a category and seize a global opportunity.

But here’s the good news. By Series C you can have more than product market fit, you can have vision market fit and real clarity on where you need to execute. Your customers who share that vision tell others, and they tell others, and your focus on customer success drives your business growth. And that’s where, as the new CRO, I need to not only put in just enough process and procedure to take us years into the future, but also to continue to fuel the business with incredible customer success stories driven by the passion of incredible Onfido talent.

I’m genuinely thrilled to be working with the founders at Onfido — Husayn, Eamon and Ruhul — as we build a category-defining global enterprise.

]]>Did you catch the Financial Services Keynote at Dreamforce? If not, you missed out – and you missed us!

During the talk, John Almeida, Director of Financial Services Industry Solutions at Salesforce, showcased Onfido as one of the most exciting new additions to the Salesforce AppExchange. Since Salesforce is the world’

Did you catch the Financial Services Keynote at Dreamforce? If not, you missed out – and you missed us!

During the talk, John Almeida, Director of Financial Services Industry Solutions at Salesforce, showcased Onfido as one of the most exciting new additions to the Salesforce AppExchange. Since Salesforce is the world’s leading Customer Relationship Management platform (over 150,000 customers and counting), that’s something we’re pretty proud of.

As the first identity verification tool to be offered within the platform, we’re excited to help Salesforce’s customers power a frictionless onboarding experience for their users. Thanks to the new partnership, users of the Financial Services Cloud will be able to digitally verify the identity of their customers and seamlessly attach the results to the customer record in Salesforce. It’ll help financial institutions onboard ​more ​customers, and meet easily with regulatory requirements – all while maintaining a clear audit trail directly in Salesforce.

Fundamentally, the integration enables financial services to interact more intelligently with their customers – something the Keynote stressed will be the defining factor as they seek to gain a competitive advantage. In a world where customer expectations are higher than ever before, but loyalty to financial services is low, tools that help banks get better connected to their customers are crucial.

The keynote was also the first outing for our new facial liveness feature. The new feature asks users to perform a randomized sequence of actions during the verification process (like looking over their shoulder, or repeating a series of numbers). It’s by far the most robust anti-impersonation tool currently available on the market, and protects both businesses and users from even the most sophisticated spoofing attempts.

In a post-Equifax world, old identifiers like SSNs are virtually useless. In their stead, biometrics-based identity verification is our best bet. Your face, after all, is a lot harder to fake. Salesforce is known for breaking new ground and new tech, so facial liveness was a natural fit for the 3,000 delegates in the room (and the other 50k streaming it live). At Onfido, we know how crucial solving digital identity is – so it’s encouraging when tech titans like Salesforce engage with the issue, too.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch it here, or check out the integration on the AppExchange. And if you want to know more about liveness, drop us a line.

Ruhul, Husayn and I founded Onfido with a big vision. We want to bring Identity Verification to the masses — to help everyone easily prove their legal identity and in turn, access the online world.

What started as 3 nerds with a crazy idea has morphed over the past 5 years into a 150-strong team. And it’s our job in the coming 5 years to transition Onfido from the dynamic, high quality startup team it is today into an iconic enterprise software company.

Being a young company has its advantages, but as we go global and focus on solving problems for the world’s largest companies, experienced senior leadership is invaluable.

Who?

After scouring the globe for many months, we were fortunate enough to meet Kevin, Andy, Andy and Lila.

Kevin Trilli, Chief Product Officer, joins from leading Data Privacy Management company TrustArc, where he served as SVP of Product. A veteran of Silicon Valley, Kevin has over 20 years of product and entrepreneurial experience in digital data security, privacy and governance, and has led the full process from strategy to execution to scale at companies including VeriSign and AssertID.

Andy Wilde, Chief Technology Officer, has more than 3 decades of experience managing Engineering teams at companies like HP and Superscape. Most recently Andy was VP Engineering at Swiftkey — one of Europe’s leading AI companies — where he built and managed the technology function through to their sale to Microsoft.

Andy Leaver, Chief Revenue Officer, joins from Sailthru in NYC where he was CRO. Andy has led international commercial teams for some of the world’s most successful enterprise software companies including Workday, Bazaarvoice, SuccessFactors, Ariba and Hortonworks — the fastest enterprise software company ever to reach $100m in revenue.

Lila Tretikov, Independent Board Director, is the former Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation and also sits on the boards of Rackspace, Crunchbase and Privacy Shell. A recognised authority in machine learning, Lila has founded and sold multiple startups as well as having led SugarCRM’s technology function as CPO and CIO.

What’s next?

Kevin and Andy Wilde will lead our world-class engineering, product and research teams to build the next version of our machine-learning based document and facial verification technology.

Andy Leaver will be spearheading our international expansion as we launch more sales teams across the globe, with LatAm and India being our two major growth regions.

There’s never been a better time to be part of this team. Check out onfido.com/careers to see how you could fit in!

]]>The Social Security Number is dead.

But don’t take our word for it – take the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator’s. “I feel very strongly that the Social Security number has outlived its usefulness”, he said at a recent Washington conference. “Every time we use the Social Security Number, we

But don’t take our word for it – take the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator’s. “I feel very strongly that the Social Security number has outlived its usefulness”, he said at a recent Washington conference. “Every time we use the Social Security Number, we put it at risk”.

The Equifax hack proves it. For years, Social Security Numbers (SSN) have been the key to verifying someone’s identity. Now, they’re just another commodity on the dark web. They can't be renewed. They can't be replaced. And worst of all, consumers have no ability to control the use of their identity to gain access to the services they need -- from banking, through to car rental and healthcare.

It’s time for something new. But what?

Biometrics-based identity verification could be the answer.

In an online world, your digital identity is lots of different things – from your IP address to your Facebook profile. In the past, it was your SSN that bound all those elements altogether and enabled you to prove who you were. But in a post-Equifax era, when that unique identifier has been leaked, it’s now a whole lot less reliable. What you can still count on is your face.

Businesses are increasingly looking to biometrics, and facial recognition in particular, to prove you are who you say you are. It’s a truly unique identifier that gives far more certainty than a number – or even a fingerprint. For smart fraudsters, it’s not that hard to lift your prints (you leave them on almost everything you touch, after all), but it’s a lot tricker to fake your face. That’s why the likes of Apple are moving away from TouchID and towards facial recognition. It’s also what inspired our new facial liveness feature, which we’ll be demo-ing at Vegas M2020.

Onfido’s facial liveness feature proves people’s identities by prompting them to film themselves repeating numbers and performing randomised movements. Our machine learning technology then compares the face in the video against the face on their identity document. It beats asking for a static image of a face, which can be cheated by simply taking a photo of a photo. It even beats liveness tests based on eyeball tracking, which can be outwitted by a fraudster holding a photo with the eyeholes cut out in front of their face. Facial Check with Video means that identity verification checks can’t be spoofed – unlike the SSN.

As banks and financial institutions push to improve their security measures in the wake of the Equifax scandal, new biometric technologies are the obvious solution. In fact, we think they could replace credit bureaus altogether.

SSN is dead. The future is facial.

Come and see the new liveness feature at Vegas Money 2020 stand 1032, or contact us if you’d like to learn more.

]]>Today (10th October) is World Mental Health Day. As an HR Manager supporting 150 people, it’s an important day for me, serving as a reminder of the importance of looking after our minds as well as our bodies. After all, we all have mental health!

Today (10th October) is World Mental Health Day. As an HR Manager supporting 150 people, it’s an important day for me, serving as a reminder of the importance of looking after our minds as well as our bodies. After all, we all have mental health!

This year, we at Onfido are proud to launch The Mental Health Pledge. Working in collaboration with Sanctus - our mental health partners – we pledge to create an open environment where mental health is supported, and people can bring their full selves to work.

Sanctus have done a huge amount to help our organisational journey to better mental health, by delivering one-to-one mental health coaching for any Onfidoer who wants support. Now, they’ve devised a list of ten principles to help us and other like-minded companies in the Sanctus community take the next step.

The Mental Health Pledge formalises our intention to pioneer a progressive approach to mental health in the workplace. It’s ultimately a promise to our team that, as a company, Onfido supports mental health in the same way that we support physical health.

We see the benefits to Onfido and our people as threefold:

It acts as a statement of intent of the importance that we, as a company, put on supporting mental health at work.

We do a lot to promote mental wellbeing at Onfido (see my previous blog on taking a positive approach to mental health at work), but we’ve never articulated a formal mental health strategy. The Pledge is therefore our ‘North Star’ for where we want to get to as an organisation.

By sharing the pledge with our team, we can gather feedback about how we’re performing against the principles. This means we can keep ourselves honest, and encourage a culture of continuous learning and improvement when it comes to supporting mental health at work.

I’m delighted to share the Pledge with our team today. Ultimately, everyone at Onfido has a part to play in making it a success – and everyone stands to benefit from it, too.